Prior Art
In the environment of network computers and communications, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) has become ubiquitous as a means of pointing to or identifying an address location of a specific item or data site accessible in a computer communications network, often called a web. A URL typically points to a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) encoded data item, such as a page of information that can be downloaded from the web and displayed at a user's workstation or network computer. However, a URL might easily point to a text file or a spreadsheet of data, another application program, a library, a file, or a database. In fact, any of the elements that a personal computer user normally accesses from their desktop environment can easily be made available over a communications network from servers or web sites for downloading and use at the user's workstation instead of being stored in memory or on a high density magnetic disk residing at the workstation. There are many advantages to downloading application programs and other computer user facilities periodically to a workstation that are well known in the art, but ease of maintaining consistent release levels and updates across a large body of users is one typical example of such advantages.
A browser is itself an application program or facility that normally resides on a user's workstation and which is invoked when the user decides to access the communications network known as the web. A prior art browser program typically sends and receives URL requests and responses to and from the communications network which forms the web. The browser also processes each type of data which is presented to it, and forwards and receives data to and from the web. A typical example is an HTML renderer function in the browser equipped computer system that displays an HTML page of data. A spreadsheet program in a typical user's computer may manipulate a spreadsheet. Interaction between the browser application and the spreadsheet application is facilitated at a user's computer to allow downloaded data, for example, to be forwarded by the browser internally to the spreadsheet application. This is done under the facilities of the user's computer operating system resident at the workstation. However, these prior art systems do not allow for multiple, concurrently active URLs, either in the browser application itself or in the operating system of the user's computer workstation. In the prior art, as a browser application is moved from URL to another URL at the user's direction, only one URL at a time is active. By active, we mean that the URL data content is loaded in memory at the user's computer and is ready for display and/or use. When a user selects another URL or selects a hyperlink from a displayed URL content, such as an HTML page, the browser application will access a new URL indicated by the hyperlink or the user's new selection. When this occurs, the previously active URL may be made inactive and stored in a history list or deleted entirely.
As stated, the URL contents are considered active when they are currently being processed by the user's computer processor, while its contents are being presented by the browser application. An active URL might constitute an HTML page of data being displayed by the browser or a spreadsheet that a user might be currently editing using a spreadsheet application program to edit data content of a URL accessed over the web. In general, the prior art browsers make a URL active only when the user types the URL manually or selects a URL link in a hypertext page environment, or selects a URL from a history list or a hot list, as these are known.
In the prior art, the browser application program typically only has a single URL active at a given time. There are two possible exceptions in that the user may start multiple application instances of the browser application and each application instance can have its own active URL, or the user may make active an HTML page pointed to by a given URL, and that page may have associated with it a frame which is a management technique supported for HTML pages that allows multiple active URLs to be present within a given HTML page. Inside an HTML page having such a frame, the user can move from one URL to another simply by clicking on links, but cannot change the number of URLs or frames or their arrangement on a page. Since each frame must have an active URL, the exact number and arrangement of active URLs are determined by the original author of the HTML page of data and does not affect the user's operating system or environment in a way which would allow universal arbitrary activation of any other multiple URLs by the user.
In addition, most prior art browsers maintain a history list of URLs that have been accessed and made active over some period of time. Depending upon the browser application itself, the history list may keep a record of URLs that have been previously active over one or many sessions or only over a short period of time, such as since logon. The history list is a tool used by the prior art URL browsers for allowing a user to navigate backwards and forwards to visit a URL that has previously been seen or to return to one and then go forward. Such a history list is a simple one dimensional array since the prior art browsers can have only a single URL active at a given time. By traversing the history list of URLs previously activated, the user can return to any previously active URLs easily, at least to the extent that the history list maintains them. History lists may be limited in the number of URLs that are kept in the list simply by memory constraints, or may be limited in the duration of time for which previously active URLs are kept in the list.
Most available browsers are known in the prior art, such as the IBM Corporation's WebExplorer(.TM.), or the Netscape Corporation's well known browser called Navigator(.TM.). Such browsers typically have history lists of URLs that have been active, and also a user reference list which a user constructs, which is permanently kept, called a hot list or bookmark list. Such lists are commonly supported by browsers, so that when a user realizes that a currently active URL content may be useful to him or her at some time in the future, a user can set a bookmark or enter the URL into the hot list while it is active so that the URL may quickly be reaccessed by simply selecting it from the hot list or bookmark list in the future.
All of these functions of the prior art browsers are supported by the computer workstation or personal computer operating system, such as the IBM OS/2(.TM.) or the Microsoft Windows(.TM.). These operating systems, and others of their type, typically feature a desktop metaphor for displaying an arrangement of icons, programs, functions and data objects and other facilities, such as printers or browsers, which may be available to the user for selection and invocation and execution by their operating system. In such environments, a desktop facility, such as an application program, can be launched or is invoked simply by selecting a data object of the type that the application program processes. The usual operating systems that present the desktop as a metaphor for the facilities available to the user through the operating system can launch and manage multiple active application programs. However, the desktop operating system does not provide the hyperlink personality that is characteristic of browsers, since the desktop operating system does not follow a user specified trail from one application program or facility to the next the way that a browser follows a trail of hyperlinks from one URL to the next, since the desktop manages multiple application programs or data objects independently, and not in a fashion that links them together in a sequence.
As the Internet or World Wide Web becomes more powerful and its use grows more prevalent, increasing numbers of computer users find that application programs available on the Internet enable them to do all of their usual and customary work that would have been done by application programs resident on their own computer system workstation. Many different application programs, such as wordprocessors or spreadsheets are now available over the Internet, in addition to the usual HTML content. As a result, many Internet users no longer need to have both the hardware and software of a fully outfitted personal computer at their individual workstation. The result is a so-called Network Computer, or NC, a computer whose function is to access a network and from which all further functionality is provided by the network. An NC may not have the local hard drive or local permanent storage typically present in a personal computer or individual workstation because storage occurs at a different physical location, such as a server, available over the web and shared by many other users. A characteristic of a Network Computer is that users can log on at any NC in the network and access their own data, whereas PC users, or workstation users, typically must use their own PCs or workstations to access their own data. The popularity of the network computer architecture is partially due to the reduced cost of hardware, but also due to the reduced cost of support. A system administrator can make changes to a user's software configuration without having to visit the user's office or to analyze the individual user's hardware configuration, which eliminates considerable expense and confusion. In addition, updating of application programs used by a group of users in common, such as in a corporate environment, can be simultaneously performed simply by changing the content at the server, which all share.
As new computer system users begin to regard the Internet or World Wide Web as their primary operating environment, there is a need for a single user interface, which is suitable for two different types of user activities. First, the ability to surf or follow a sequential series of links or hyperlinks is necessary for perusing the extensive content available on the web. Secondly, managing of multiple concurrently active applications or data objects (accessed from URLs) is required to take place in a way similar in effect to that provided by the operating system of personal computers or workstations. Currently, personal computers and workstation handle the two different types of activity with two different user interfaces. The desktop interface manages applications, of which the browser is simply one of the applications, and the browser interface supports and manages the surfing capability for accessing various URLs via in the web.
The typical browser today supports the surfing navigation, and also provides powerful search algorithms developed for finding or locating specific topics and contents of URLS, wherever they may reside in the World Wide Web. In combination, the net or World Wide Web, in conjunction with a browser search engine, will now provide to the user the overall data retrieval mechanism to operate much as a host supported workstation of the past. In the World Wide Web, documents or sites, are typically written in a definition language, referred to as HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Until very recently, the World Wide Web included sites with almost exclusively two-dimensional graphics and text. This was, in part, due to limitations inherent in the original HTML language capability. The Internet itself is a large number of computers, which are linked together via a communications network, and which contains a large number of sites, each site having its own unique URL to identify the computer location on the Internet at which the site resides. A typical user accesses a site on the Internet from the personal computer or workstation via a communications adapter connected to a telephone line, and from thence to an Internet service provider which links the user to the Internet or World Wide Web. The user needs web browser software, such as the Netscape Corporation's Navigator or IBM's Web Explorer, as noted above. The browser is run as an application program on his or her workstation or personal computer to enable the user to view the World Wide Web content on the Internet.